The Promise of “Resurrection”

This was a show that took me over a year to watch. I had it on disc and I would pop in two episodes when I couldn’t access anime by any other means. It was another show with a great deal of initial promise that lost it along the way.

“Princess Resurrection” starts out simply enough: Sawawa Hiyorimi (the maid at the far right) has gotten a job working for a benefactor in Sasanaki City. Sawawa has asked her younger brother, Hiro, (that hopeless dude in the center) to come over. As he is walking the streets, he sees a long cool woman in a black dress and a short servant carrying a huge pile of purchases. Overhead is a hoist of I-beams that manages to break free. Hiro pushes her out of the way, but dies in the process. In the morgue, this woman bestows the Flame of Life on Hiro, but there are conditions.

The woman is Hime (the princess; her real name is Lillianne von Phoenix, but she detests being called that) and the servant is Flandre, a caliber of robot. Flan, as she is called, suffers from the Pikachu Syndrome, in that she can only say one word (“Huga”), but it manages to explain a plethora of thoughts and ideas. Now, Sawawa is completely oblivious to all the supernatural events at the house, hired more for her gigantic cups….of tea! Hime enjoys what she can brew up.

Back to Hiro. He is now Hime’s soldier for life. He has half-immortality. That means he can live forever, as long as Hime bestows the Flame of Life on him. So, I thought the series was going to be how Hiro has to do her dirty work, while trying to figure out a way to get out from under this ‘deal’, but not die in the process. That didn’t happen. The show took a caliber of comedic approach to things, while trying to keep its ‘serious’ nature, but it ended up being a grand mess.

Also in the picture is Liza Wildman. Her father, Volg Wildman, is a full werewolf, but gets killed by Hime (the details of the whole thing spin out throughout the show). She, however, is only half-wolf, so can only partially transform (thus the weird arms). But she has a long way to go to get stronger. That schoolgirl type IS a school girl and goes to the same school as Hiro. She is Reiri Kamura and is very popular at the school, so everyone implodes when she hangs out with Hiro. She is more of a nettlesome person, in that she will warn Hime of potential problems, but will decline to ‘get her hands dirty’, as vampires don’t do helpful things. Oh, yeah, she’s a vampire. She and Liza have a running battle as Reiri looks down on werewolves.

The real show detailed the efforts that people from the Royal Kingdom and Hime’s own family engage in, so they can kill Hime to get her out of the way. There is some kind of big power struggle going on. Hime wants no part of it, but she’s dragged into the middle of the feud. It’s just that the show had to be fish or fowl and was neither. Even when it was ‘dramatic’, it really wasn’t all that dramatic. And when you fling in the comic elements (panda bear bodyguards, riding duel with a headless horseman, the Battle of the Bots), you are left at sea (and there is an episode where you are really left at sea).

And when we get to the dramatic conclusion, it wasn’t presented as such, more like a water balloon fight in both scope and intensity. Only when I saw the last two episodes (both goofy and silly, another “Darker than Black” Syndrome) you realize the actual meat of the show ended, but none of the overall problems were truly resolved. A three-episode OVA came out that muddied the waters, as it took an alternative look at the events from the series (and a different art style; the original was from Madhouse, the OVA from Tatsunoko Productions). But since it has been seven years since the series ended and three years since the OVA, nothing is going to get resolved, and the series is effectively over.

One more parting shot: this show does one of those annoying thing with the episodes; for this one, every episodes starts with “Princess (fill in the blank)”, but it sometimes have nothing to do with the actual plot, so it’s grating that they couldn’t come up with something more original. On a scale of 1 to 10:

Artwork 7 (Nothing spectacular) Plot 7 (Hit and miss) Pacing 7 (Moves along consistently) Effectiveness 7 (Not certain where it wants to go with it)Conclusion 5 (It reaches a ‘coupler’, but doesn’t really end)Fan Service 4 (A similar show would be “Gurren Lagaan”)